Driscoll suggests Army can take a page from Silicon Valley business model

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll thinks the Army could take a lesson from Silicon Valley when it comes to how the service does business.

Driscoll, speaking Thursday at an event hosted by Axios in Washington, recalled visiting Applied Intuition’s headquarters in California about seven weeks ago along with Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George. The secretary and chief told company officials they would provide the company with a humvee or Infantry Squad Vehicle and asked them to “make it look cool.”

“We got them a vehicle. Ten days later they sent us a video. Fully autonomous, they had linked it with their drone network, it was awesome,” Driscoll said. “Two days later, we had a carrier there, and we took these new vehicles. We drove them to our training units. Our soldiers from start to finish within 25 days are testing these things and sending us videos of whether it works or not.”

Driscoll said Thursday that the Army must reward companies that deliver products soldiers “like and need,” by incentivizing them to innovate.

“That’s the place where Silicon Valley and a lot of these venture-backed businesses have figured out what minimum viable product means and what it means to get it in the hands of your customer and learn from them,” he said.

Since coming into the job about three months ago, Driscoll has made a series of appearances on television shows and podcasts in which he has emphasized the Army has been a poor customer in the past and must get away from parochial interests. On Thursday, Driscoll used the recent humvee cancellation as an example of how the Army must change how it does business.

“We then have to ship that humvee to a depot in somebody’s state, and get antilock brakes put on it, and then ship it back, and then the humvee just sits on the sideline,” he said.

“I think that system has just created very bad behavior in a lot of the companies in the defense space. And so, what I mean by that is, any company who continues to operate that way and optimize their resources not to innovation, not to what the American soldier needs to stay safe, I hope they go out of business.”